The Sea Change Read Online Free PDF Page B

– how not even my parents know what we have done. How I don’t know
where he is – that I need to go and look for him. He speaks Tamil back to me,
accompanying his words with broad, bold hand movements, which I watch, eager to
interpret what he is saying. I try to discern the verbs and nouns from his tones,
holding each sound in my head and attempting to dissect it. In the end, I have to let
his sentences go – they don’t yield their logic easily and the words blur
together. He turns away from me after a while, frustrated at not being understood. We
resume our gaze at the sea.
    We try to paddle our way back to the shore
but the beach soon slips beneath the horizon. I think of James, adrift maybe, like me,
waiting on the mercy of the tides. It’s no use. We cannot resist their pull. We
can only lie with our arms dipping like nibs into the water and go wherever the currents
decide.
    Minutes pass like hours, hours like minutes.
Time dries in our throats. Flotillas of drinking water appear on the horizon ifI stare at it for too long. The sun becomes what I want it to be – a
giant parasol cocooning me like night – instead of what it is: unbearably bright and
scorching. And all the while we’re floating, riding the roof as if it were the
saddle of a horse, never still.
    Night comes. And then day. Time gathers. And
gathers again. Waves bloat and expire.
    The heat invades the gap between my waking
and sleeping. I’m afraid that, if I don’t find a way of waking myself, my
mind will drift off with my body to a place with no anchor – no hard, still point on
which to tie thoughts; only thirst.
    In a last-ditch attempt to keep myself
awake, I press my hands together in a sideways prayer and extend them towards my
companion. I motion for him to copy me so that our middle fingers are just touching. He
frowns and I go in for the slap, clapping my palm onto the back of his outstretched hand
and letting the sound ring out across the water. A clean slice through the ears. Finally
I am awake.
    He whips his fingers away and cradles them
against his chest crossly. ‘
Yenna seyringa? Athu vallithidhu!
’
    I smile and hold out my hands again in the
same position. He shakes his head and pushes air towards me to dismiss me. But I keep my
hands where they are and wait.
    ‘Come on,’ I rasp – throat dry
from the saltwater. ‘It’ll take our minds off it.’
    After a few minutes, he mutters something
and presents his hands to me again. Before I can ready myself, he has launched into a
swipe that sends a sting up my arm. ‘See!’ I laugh, with a flinch.
    He smiles and tilts his head from side to
side. Then he points to his chest. ‘Ravindra. Ra-vin-dra,’ he repeats,
separating the syllables for me.
    ‘Alice,’ I reply, offering a
hand. He doesn’t take it and instead presses his palms together under his
chin.
    ‘Aleece,’ he echoes, trying out
the word on his tongue.
    I speak his own name, attempting to roll the
second
r
as he did but not quite pulling it off.
    He settles down again on the roof. It is not
long before the silence returns. The heat has baked my clothes dry. James’s shirt,
which I pulled from under his pillow and threw over myself before I left the hotel room,
is stiff with a thick skin of silt. I try to think of where he might be – if he made it
to higher ground.
    Did he even see it coming? Or did he just
carry on in the heat with his back turned, oblivious to the water twisting into a fist
behind him? The day had lulled us both with its blue sky and lush greens; we
hadn’t thought it might collapse. We should have guessed our time might be gone
before we had the chance to measure its weight.
    It seemed so beautiful – the notion of us
driving for thousands of miles over Persian ruins and Kashmiri meadows. I fell in love
with the trip before I fell in love with him. The idea of it. And those startling eyes
of his, which seemed already to have a bazaar of stories hidden in them before we even
set foot